


Accident

by OzQueen



Series: babysitters100 [51]
Category: Baby-Sitters Club - Ann M. Martin
Genre: Community: babysitters100, Community: cottoncandy_bingo, F/M, Family, Fluff, Gen, Parents, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-30
Updated: 2014-03-30
Packaged: 2018-01-17 12:52:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1388359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OzQueen/pseuds/OzQueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlotte's favourite question is one with a definitive answer she can never seem to discover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Accident

**Author's Note:**

> Just FYI, the prompt for this one is the most tenuously linked thing _ever_ , and I suspect I will be warning for that more and more often as I progress through my [table](http://babysitters100.dreamwidth.org/58373.html). It's really not a big-running theme through the fic at all, it relates to maybe one paragraph, but damn it, it's there, and I'm using it.
> 
> Fills the favourite square on my [cottoncandy_bingo card](http://sweetcarousel.dreamwidth.org/115340.html), and 'favourite' is probably a better-suited prompt here.
> 
> Also we need moar Johanssen fic.

For as long as she could remember, Charlotte's parents had told her how very important it was to ask questions, because asking questions was how you learned almost everything, even if you didn't ask aloud.

“If you ask a question to yourself, you still want to find the answer, don't you?” her father said, and Charlotte nodded solemnly and then thought very carefully about a question she wanted the answer to, because it seemed that by asking that question, Daddy wanted one in return.

Sometimes she asked serious questions, like _what is the moon made of?_ (rock and dust and not even a little bit of cheese), or _how long is Hickory Creek?_ (seven miles before it goes underground, and nobody knows after that). 

Her favourite question, though, was the question with a definitive answer which she never received, no matter how often she asked. Questions which required a side of guesswork and mystery-solving were so much more interesting than questions which had already been solved by others; questions which had their answers printed in books a thousand times over.

“How did you and Mommy meet?”

The answer changed every time, and it was up to Charlotte to figure out whether or not she had ever received the facts; to determine time and time again whether the story was mere fancy or a wonderful telling of truth.

“We were pen pals,” Daddy told her when she was four and they were sitting at the kitchen table with the warm scent of buttered toast in the air. “We wrote pages and pages of letters to one another and they crossed the country state by state and arrived with stamps from places we still haven't been to, and the envelopes covered with fingerprints belonging to people we'll never meet.”

And Mommy set a plate of scrambled eggs down in front of him and smiled and said, “Your writing was always terrible, but you signed every letter with a little kiss, so I forgave you.”

There was, however, a distinct lack of evidence to support this story, as Charlotte had never seen a box or a trunk or a drawer filled with letters from one parent to another.

This, then, was a falsehood. But a good story all the same.

-

One Saturday morning, when Charlotte was five and the early sun was melting the icicles hanging from the eaves with a steady drip-drip-drip, she snuggled herself between her parents in bed and asked the question again.

“How did you meet Daddy?”

Charlotte watched her mother's gaze rise slightly so she was looking over Charlotte's head at Daddy; saw the way the little lines around her dark eyes creased in a smile before she looked back at her again.

“I was an intern and he came in with a broken finger after he'd caught his hand in a door,” Mommy said. “I set his bones, and when I put his finger in a splint he told me he wanted to thank me by taking me to dinner.”

“I was so distracted by such a pretty smile my finger stopped hurting almost at once,” Daddy said, pulling the quilt up so it was tucked beneath Charlotte's chin.

Charlotte thought this story was plausible, until she asked why Daddy's fingers weren't crooked, and her mother just gave her a grin and closed her eyes again, burrowing down into her pillow as the ice kept melting outside.

-

Sometimes, the best way to get an answer was to work backwards, by ruling out a possibility you'd already thought of. 

“Did you meet Mommy at the beach?” she asked one summer, curling her toes in the wet sand and clinging tightly to her parents' hands as the surf rolled towards them again. Fear quivered in her belly at the sound and sight of so much water. 

“No,” Daddy said, looking first at Mommy and then down at Charlotte, the salt-tipped wind blowing his hair back. “It was when she was camping with Aunt Nell and I was camping with some friends from college, and we met in the middle of a pine forest and shared s'mores around a campfire.”

“It was cold,” Mommy added, and she grinned when a wave, shallowed out by its long run up the sand, washed over her feet and around her ankles. “The wind made a wonderful noise when it blew through all those pine branches.”

Charlotte could not think of a reason as to why this would not be true, until she asked Aunt Nell if she had ever been camping in a pine forest, and Aunt Nell said no, she hadn't.

-

“Will you tell us a bedtime story?” Charlotte requested, one arm looped over the fat, snuffling little puppy they had so carefully selected that afternoon. 

“Which one?” Daddy asked, sitting on the end of Charlotte's bed and nodding to her overflowing bookcase. Mommy leaned against the doorjamb with folded arms and a small smile. 

“Tell me how you met Mommy,” Charlotte said, shifting her eyes from one parent to another and back again.

Mommy sank onto the bed beside Daddy and the puppy snuffed and quivered and then stilled again, quick, heavy breaths rising and falling under Charlotte's arm.

“I think it was in Paris, wasn't it, dear?” Daddy asked, taking Mommy's hand.

“In the Louvre,” Mommy agreed, a dreamy smile on her face. “I was admiring the Marly Horses. When we go to the library tomorrow, Char, I'll find an art book and show you a picture. They're beautiful. And one day we'll take you to Prospect Park in Brooklyn and show you the Horse Tamers.”

“They're beautiful, too,” Daddy added. “Very powerful, and they leave you feeling very small and very inspired.”

“We stood there in front of these big stone horses and we didn't say anything for a long time,” Mommy said. “But we were both feeling the same things, and we were both sharing a very special and personal moment, and it's very hard to let go of someone after you share something so moving together, even if it's in silence.”

And then Daddy kissed Mommy's cheek and Charlotte hugged the puppy a little closer. A follow up question might separate fact from fiction, but Charlotte didn't care to find out, this time.

-

“In the summer between high school and college, Guillaume's Circus came to town,” Daddy said, his fingers still curled around the steering wheel as they waited in the hospital parking lot for Mommy to come and meet them. “I needed some extra money so I took on a job as a clown, and I fell in love with Mommy the minute I saw her flying through the air to catch the next trapeze bar in her hands.”

Charlotte just fixed him with a shrewd look when his eyes met hers in the rear-view mirror, and he laughed and looked out the window towards the hospital again.

-

“We were both as old as you are now,” Mommy said as they stood beneath a towering maple waiting for Carrot to finish nosing at the orange leaves beneath. “We were in hospital with tonsillitis, our beds opposite one another, and he kept pulling faces at me as we ate our ice cream and waited for the time we could go home.”

Charlotte remembered the scratchy, sore feeling of tonsillitis and grimaced in sympathy. 

And then she thought for a moment and said, “You couldn't both be as old as I am now. Daddy is two years older than you.”

“Is he?” her mother asked mildly, and she smiled and took Charlotte's hand as Carrot tugged on the leash again, eager to progress further on their walk.

“ _Is_ he?” Charlotte asked with wide eyes, wondering suddenly what was truth and what wasn't.

“He is,” Mommy confirmed. “I must have gotten that part mixed up.”

-

When her parents renewed their vows, Charlotte half-hoped she could find out the real story, and half-hoped she would not.

“How did they meet?” she asked Aunt Nell late in the evening, yellow lights strung across the back yard, music murmuring under the chatter and laughter of their friends and family.

Aunt Nell laughed, and looked over at Charlotte's parents, standing with their arms around each other, her father's head dipped so his brow rested against her mother's. “Feels like they've just always known each other,” she said, and Charlotte didn't bother prompting for a more detailed answer than that, because she knew nothing else would be quite so satisfactory.

-

“There's been an accident on the I-95,” Mom said as Charlotte stood in the assistant principal's office, clutching the phone with white-knuckled hands. “Dad's got a concussion, but he'll be okay. He might have to stay in overnight.”

“I'm coming to see him,” Charlotte said firmly, though she didn't know how she'd get there. She passed the phone back to Mr. Kingbridge, and he spoke in quiet tones with Charlotte's mom for a moment and then offered to drive Charlotte to the bus station, if Dr. Johanssen was okay with that.

Forty minutes later she was sitting on a bus to Stamford, fists clenched tightly in her lap as they passed over the criss-crossed rubber marks and the glittering glass still on the black-top.

Her mother was sitting on the edge of her father's hospital bed when she arrived, fingers combing gently through Dad's hair, an eggplant bruise on the side of his face. 

“Char's here,” she said softly, smiling, and Dad opened his eyes, though they weren't quite right, and Charlotte took a moment to remind herself of everything she knew about concussion. 

“Are you okay?” she asked in a small voice, and the tears she'd managed to hold back on the bus suddenly overwhelmed her and spilled over. 

“I'm okay,” Dad promised, his voice quiet and drowsy. 

Charlotte sat on the other side of the bed and took his hand, and she started asking questions, because questions and answers could sometimes be comfortable and confined; they didn't always have to open new doors of knowledge or exploration. “Do you remember what happened?”

“Happened ahead of me,” Dad said. “Just couldn't stop in time.” 

“When’s your birthday?” Charlotte demanded, and her mother chuckled lightly and she saw Dad's mouth lift into a little smile. 

“May nine,” he said. “And yours is the third of June.” 

She relaxed a little bit, and they all sat there in silence for a little while, listening to the noise of the hospital corridor on the other side of the open door.

“How did you meet Mom?” Charlotte asked after a while, and she wondered if this time he would answer seriously to prove he really could remember, or if he felt well enough to continue the game they had always played.

He shifted his head on the pillow, a little frown on his face. “On the subway,” he said. “When I worked in New York City and she was still an intern, and we took the train to the same station every day. She always had her nose buried in some book or another, and it was weeks before she looked up at me and I got to see the colour of her eyes.”

Charlotte's mother laughed softly and stroked his hair again, and Charlotte could tell – though she didn't know how – that he had not told her the truth this time, either.

-

“You don't know how to tango,” Charlotte said, rolling her eyes.

Dad spun Mom and she leaned back over his arm, tipping her head right back so she was looking at Charlotte upside-down.

“Of course we do,” Mom said. “We met during a masquerade ball in the marble court of the Versailles, dressed in our finery and tangoing up a storm in front of celebrities and royalty.”

Dad pulled her upright, hands catching hers as they stepped into the square of sunlight spilling through the living room window. “Later that night we stole a pearl necklace from a duchess and caught a midnight train to Giverny, and they haven't caught us yet,” he said with a grin.

-

“You're the smartest person I know,” Becca once whispered in the dim hush of the Stoneybrook Public Library, papers and text books scattered between them as they studied for a calculus exam. “If you really wanted to find out how they met, you could.”

“I know,” Charlotte said with a smile, her fingers aching as she pressed pen to paper. “But sometimes the best part of asking a question is knowing there are still endless possibilities when it comes to an answer.”


End file.
